WordPress continues to be one of the most popular blogging platforms, but you don’t want your blog to look like everyone else’s. To aid you in your search for the right theme, we’re kicking off a new series of posts here on Blogging Tips that will highlight some of the best WordPress templates on the ‘net.
The first in this series is Thesis Theme.
The default installation of Thesis Theme has a simple navigation bar along the top of the screen, a multimedia box in the sidebar, and a magazine-style layout below the fold for highlighting more posts. Interestingly, one of the most unique features of Thesis Theme is its flexibility.
Without having to dive into the raw code, you can adjust many of the design options through the WordPress control panel. Thesis Theme can be configured to have one, two, or three columns, and you can adjust their respective order and pixel width. The admin area also allows for the changing of colors, fonts, multimedia box content, navigation style, borders, and more.
While Thesis Theme allows you to completely customize the look and feel of your WordPress site, the design markup is actually separate from the HTML code. This way, the underlying code can be as clean as possible, which can be very beneficial from a search engine optimization standpoint.
Further to the SEO benefits found in Thesis Theme are the ability to add custom titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, CSS class, and more to individual posts. The WordPress dashboard has an area to enter your RSS feed and stats code information.
Some popular sites that use the Thesis Theme include the following:
As you can see from these examples, particularly with Copyblogger, Thesis Theme can be highly adjusted to suit your needs. You can check out the demo site as well. For more information on how what Thesis can do, and how to use “Hooks”, check out this additional Thesis review.
Thesis Theme is available at DIYthemes. The personal option (one live website) is $87 and the developer’s option (unlimited websites that you own) is $164. Both options allow for footer attribution removal.
See, I'm not too sure about thesis, but that might because a lot of site that I take over that are done in WordPress, are usually done in Thesis. And I am hired to go in an clean everything up and it is just atrocious.
I have yet to see one good Thesis design with good clean code in person.
I saw this title in my feed reader and clicked over to have a look at how to customize my Theses theme (just started using Theses, so this sparked my interest) only to find that really you don't give any relevant information other than stick your affiliate link on the article some 14 times (including in peoples comments, which I think is wrong BTW).
Disappointed to say the least.
I'm currently looking for a premium theme for my WordPress blog and I'm looking forward to your WP template reviews.
I've seen a lot of Thesis blogs out there and it doesn't strike me as the right theme for me. I'm not sure how much (if any) custom coding is involved in some of the sample themes or if you can do all that straight out of the box with the admin panel.
I guess one other thing is Thesis has social proof. How can so many bloggers be wrong? It makes me feel a little better that so many trust Thesis, but then again I'd also like to have a unique design.
lol thanks for the links. I just spend the last 20 minutes looking at cuteoverload and laughing my butt off!
bro that cute overload blog is lovely and I had to ssit down for a hour to admire the cuteness that I was watching.
You know what I really love about these themes, they load instantly. It's amazing how fast they pop up. Thesis is the way to go.
Hey thanks so much for this article post I never really knew about this type of theme it look very cool I'm going to use it on my new Blog. By the way your site looks really professional I Love the colors.
clean theme and simple make it easy to customize by blog owner. It also make your blog looks like professional blog. So impressive ,like this theme so much.
Hi,
I just thought I should point out that I think you might be incorrect right at the end of your article regarding removal of the footer attribution. You can see here on the DIY Themes pricing page it clearly states that on the personal license you cannot remove the footer attribution.
Otherwise, good post!
Once users grasp the Thesis Theme custom folder concept used to hold custom files, you can do any design you want with Thesis. You mention the flexibility of Thesis and I see that as being one of the reasons people don't understand Thesis. Because it's minimal by design, you can't see how flexible it is. You can actually design some cool site just by using the custom css and not touching the custom functions file.
I like your review of Thesis.
Great post I am looking for a new look for my blogs and I think this will be the one Thanks for doing the homework. Chuck Lawyers